Part I: Feuerbach.
Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlook

B. The Illusion of the Epoch

Civil Society and the Conception of History

The form of intercourse determined by the existing productive forces at
all previous historical stages, and in its turn determining these, is civil
society. The latter, as is clear from what we have said above, has as its
premises and basis the simple family and the multiple, the so-called
tribe, the more precise determinants of this society are enumerated in
our remarks above. Already here we see how this civil society is the true
source and theatre of all history, and how absurd is the conception of
history held hitherto, which neglects the real relationships and confines
itself to high-sounding dramas of princes and states.

Civil society embraces the whole material intercourse of individuals
within a definite stage of the development of productive forces. It
embraces the whole commercial and industrial life of a given stage and,
insofar, transcends the State and the nation, though, on the other hand
again, it must assert itself in its foreign relations as nationality, and
inwardly must organise itself as State. The word “civil society”
[bürgerliche Gesellschaft] emerged in the eighteenth century, when
property relationships had already extricated themselves from the
ancient and medieval communal society. Civil society as such only
develops with the bourgeoisie; the social organisation evolving directly
out of production and commerce, which in all ages forms the basis of
the State and of the rest of the idealistic superstructure, has, however,
always been designated by the same name.

Conclusions from the Materialist Conception of History

History is nothing but the succession of the separate generations,
each of which exploits the materials, the capital funds, the productive
forces handed down to it by all preceding generations, and thus, on the
one hand, continues the traditional activity in completely changed
circumstances and, on the other, modifies the old circumstances with a
completely changed activity. This can be speculatively distorted so that
later history is made the goal of earlier history, e.g. the goal ascribed to
the discovery of America is to further the eruption of the French
Revolution. Thereby history receives its own special aims and becomes
“a person rating with other persons” (to wit: “Self-Consciousness,
Criticism, the Unique,” etc.), while what is designated with the words
“destiny,” “goal,” “germ,” or “idea” of earlier history is nothing more than an abstraction formed from later history, from the active influence
which earlier history exercises on later history.

The further the separate spheres, which interact on one another,
extend in the course of this development, the more the original isolation
of the separate nationalities is destroyed by the developed mode of
production and intercourse and the division of labour between various
nations naturally brought forth by these, the more history becomes world
history. Thus, for instance, if in England a machine is invented, which
deprives countless workers of bread in India and China, and overturns
the whole form of existence of these empires, this invention becomes a
world-historical fact. Or again, take the case of sugar and coffee which
have proved their world-historical importance in the nineteenth century
by the fact that the lack of these products, occasioned by the
Napoleonic Continental System, caused the Germans to rise against
Napoleon, and thus became the real basis of the glorious Wars of
liberation of 1813. From this it follows that this transformation of history
into world history is not indeed a mere abstract act on the part of the
“self-consciousness,” the world spirit, or of any other metaphysical
spectre, but a quite material, empirically verifiable act, an act the proof
of which every individual furnishes as he comes and goes, eats, drinks
and clothes himself.

[7. Summary of the Materialist Conception of History]

This conception of history depends on our ability to expound the real
process of production, starting out from the material production of life
itself, and to comprehend the form of intercourse connected with this
and created by this mode of production (i.e. civil society in its various
stages), as the basis of all history; and to show it in its action as State,
to explain all the different theoretical products and forms of
consciousness, religion, philosophy, ethics, etc. etc. and trace their
origins and growth from that basis; by which means, of course, the
whole thing can be depicted in its totality (and therefore, too, the
reciprocal action of these various sides on one another). It has not, like
the idealistic view of history, in every period to look for a category, but
remains constantly on the real ground of history; it does not explain
practice from the idea but explains the formation of ideas from material
practice; and accordingly it comes to the conclusion that all forms and
products of consciousness cannot be dissolved by mental criticism, by
resolution into “self-consciousness” or transformation into “apparitions,”
“spectres,” “fancies,” etc. but only by the practical overthrow of the
actual social relations which gave rise to this idealistic humbug; that not
criticism but revolution is the driving force of history, also of religion, of
philosophy and all other types of theory. It shows that history does not
end by being resolved into “self-consciousness as spirit of the spirit,” but
that in it at each stage there is found a material result: a sum of
productive forces, an historically created relation of individuals to nature
and to one another, which is handed down to each generation from its
predecessor; a mass of productive forces, capital funds and conditions,
which, on the one hand, is indeed modified by the new generation, but
also on the other prescribes for it its conditions of life and gives it a
definite development, a special character. It shows that circumstances
make men just as much as men make circumstances.

This sum of productive forces, capital funds and social forms of
intercourse, which every individual and generation finds in existence as
something given, is the real basis of what the philosophers have
conceived as “substance” and “essence of man,” and what they have
deified and attacked; a real basis which is not in the least disturbed, in
its effect and influence on the development of men, by the fact that
these philosophers revolt against it as “self-consciousness” and the
“Unique.” These conditions of life, which different generations find in
existence, decide also whether or not the periodically recurring
revolutionary convulsion will be strong enough to overthrow the basis of
the entire existing system. And if these material elements of a complete
revolution are not present (namely, on the one hand the existing
productive forces, on the other the formation of a revolutionary mass,
which revolts not only against separate conditions of society up till then,
but against the very “production of life” till then, the “total activity” on
which it was based), then, as far as practical development is concerned,
it is absolutely immaterial whether the idea of this revolution has been
expressed a hundred times already, as the history of communism
proves.

[8. The Inconsistency of the Idealist Conception of History in General, and of German Post-Hegelian Philosophy in Particular]

In the whole conception of history up to the present this real basis of
history has either been totally neglected or else considered as a minor
matter quite irrelevant to the course of history. History must, therefore,
always be written according to an extraneous standard; the real
production of life seems to be primeval history, while the truly historical
appears to be separated from ordinary life, something extra-superterrestrial.
With this the relation of man to nature is excluded from
history and hence the antithesis of nature and history is created. The
exponents of this conception of history have consequently only been able
to see in history the political actions of princes and States, religious and
all sorts of theoretical struggles, and in particular in each historical
epoch have had to share the illusion of that epoch. For instance, if an
epoch imagines itself to be actuated by purely “political” or “religious”
motives, although “religion” and “politics” are only forms of its true
motives, the historian accepts this opinion. The “idea,” the “conception”
of the people in question about their real practice, is transformed into
the sole determining, active force, which controls and determines their
practice. When the crude form in which the division of labour appears
with the Indians and Egyptians calls forth the caste-system in their State
and religion, the historian believes that the caste-system is the power
which has produced this crude social form.

While the French and the English at least hold by the political illusion, which is moderately close
to reality, the Germans move in the realm of the “pure spirit,” and make
religious illusion the driving force of history. The Hegelian philosophy of
history is the last consequence, reduced to its “finest expression,” of all
this German historiography, for which it is not a question of real, nor
even of political, interests, but of pure thoughts, which consequently
must appear to Saint Bruno as a series of “thoughts” that devour one
another and are finally swallowed up in “self-consciousness.”
—

— and even more consistently the course of history must appear to Saint Max Stirner, who knows not a thing about real history, as a mere “tale of knights, robbers and ghosts,”[24] from whose visions he can, of course, only save himself by “unholiness”. This conception is truly religious: it postulates religious man as the primitive man, the starting-point of history, and in its imagination puts the religious production of fancies in the place of the real production of the means of subsistence and of life itself.

This whole conception of history, together with its dissolution and the scruples and qualms resulting from it, is a purely national affair of the Germans and has merely local interest for Germany, as for instance the important question which has been under discussion in recent times: how exactly one “passes from the realm of God to the realm of Man” [Ludwig Feuerbach, Ueber das Wesen des Christenthums] – as if this “realm of God” had ever existed anywhere save in the imagination, and the learned gentlemen, without being aware of it, were not constantly living in the “realm of Man” to which they are now seeking the way; and as if the learned pastime (for it is nothing more) of explaining the mystery of this theoretical bubble-blowing did not on the contrary lie in demonstrating its origin in actual earthly relations. For these Germans, it is altogether simply a matter of resolving the ready-made nonsense they find into some other freak, i.e., of presupposing that all this nonsense has a special sense which can be discovered; while really it is only a question of explaining these theoretical phrases from the actual existing relations. The real, practical dissolution of these phrases, the removal of these notions from the consciousness of men, will, as we have already said, be effected by altered circumstances, not by theoretical deductions. For the mass of men, i.e., the proletariat, these theoretical notions do not exist and hence do not require to be dissolved, and if this mass ever had any theoretical notions, e.g., religion, these have now long been dissolved by circumstances.

The purely national character of these questions and solutions is moreover shown by the fact that these theorists believe in all seriousness that chimeras like “the God-Man,” “Man,” etc., have presided over individual epochs of history (Saint Bruno even goes so far as to assert that only “criticism and critics have made history,” [Bruno Bauer, Charakteristik Ludwig Feuerbachs] and when they themselves construct historical systems, they skip over all earlier periods in the greatest haste and pass immediately from “Mongolism” [Max Stirner, Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum] to history “with meaningful content,” that is to say, to the history, of the Hallische and Deutsche Jahrbücher and the dissolution of the Hegelian school into a general squabble. They forget all other nations, all real events, and the theatrum mundi is confined to the Leipzig book fair and the mutual quarrels of “criticism,” [Bruno Bauer] “man,” [Ludwig Feuerbach] and “the unique”. [Max Stirner] If for once these theorists treat really historical subjects, as for instance the eighteenth century, they merely give a history of ideas, separated from the facts and the practical development underlying them; and even that merely in order to represent that period as an imperfect preliminary stage, the as yet limited predecessor of the truly historical age, i.e., the period of the German philosophic struggle from 1840 to 1844. As might be expected when the history of an earlier period is written with the aim of accentuating the brilliance of an unhistoric person and his fantasies, all the really historic events, even the really historic interventions of politics in history, receive no mention. Instead we get a narrative based not on research but on arbitrary constructions and literary gossip, such as Saint Bruno provided in his now forgotten history of the eighteenth century. [Bruno Bauer, Geschichte der Politik, Cultur und Aufklärung des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts] These pompous and arrogant hucksters of ideas, who imagine themselves infinitely exalted above all national prejudices, are thus in practice far more national than the beer-swilling philistines who dream of a united Germany. They do not recognise the deeds of other nations as historical; they live in Germany, within Germany 1281 and for Germany; they turn the Rhine-song [25] into a religious hymn and conquer Alsace and Lorraine by robbing French philosophy instead of the French state, by Germanising French ideas instead of French provinces. Herr Venedey is a cosmopolitan compared with the Saints Bruno and Max, who, in the universal dominance of theory, proclaim the universal dominance of Germany.

Feuerbach: Philosophic, and Real, Liberation

[...] It is also clear from these arguments how grossly Feuerbach is
deceiving himself when (Wigand’s Vierteljahrsschrift, 1845, Band 2) by
virtue of the qualification “common man” he declares himself a
communist,[26]
transforms the latter into a predicate of “man,” and thereby
thinks it possible to change the word “communist,” which in the real
world means the follower of a definite revolutionary party, into a mere
category. Feuerbach’s whole deduction with regard to the relation of
men to one another goes only so far as to prove that men need and
always have needed each other. He wants to establish consciousness of
this fact, that is to say, like the other theorists, merely to produce a
correct consciousness about an existing fact; whereas for the real
communist it is a question of overthrowing the existing state of things.
We thoroughly appreciate, moreover, that Feuerbach, in endeavouring to
produce consciousness of just this fact, is going as far as a theorist
possibly can, without ceasing to be a theorist and philosopher...

As an example of Feuerbach’s acceptance and at the same time
misunderstanding of existing reality, which he still shares with our
opponents, we recall the passage in the Philosophie der Zukunft where
he develops the view that the existence of a thing or a man is at the
same time its or his essence, that the conditions of existence, the mode
of life and activity of an animal or human individual are those in which
its “essence” feels itself satisfied. Here every exception is expressly
conceived as an unhappy chance, as an abnormality which cannot be
altered. Thus if millions of proletarians feel by no means contented with
their living conditions, if their “existence” does not in the least
correspond to their “essence,” then, according to the passage quoted,
this is an unavoidable misfortune, which must be borne quietly. The
millions of proletarians and communists, however, think differently and
will prove this in time, when they bring their “existence” into harmony
with their “essence” in a practical way, by means of a revolution.
Feuerbach, therefore, never speaks of the world of man in such cases,
but always takes refuge in external nature, and moreover in nature
which has not yet been subdued by men. But every new invention, every
advance made by industry, detaches another piece from this domain, so
that the ground which produces examples illustrating such Feuerbachian
propositions is steadily shrinking.

The “essence” of the fish is its “being,” water – to go no further than this one proposition. The “essence” of the freshwater fish is the water of a river. But the latter ceases to be the “essence” of the fish and is no longer a suitable medium of existence as soon as the river is made to serve industry, as soon as it is polluted by dyes and other waste products and navigated by steamboats, or as soon as its water is diverted into canals where simple drainage can deprive the fish of its medium of existence. The explanation that all such contradictions are inevitable abnormalities does not essentially differ from the consolation which Saint Max Stirner offers to the discontented, saving that this contradiction is their own contradiction and this predicament their own predicament, whereupon then, should either set their minds at ease, keep their disgust to themselves, or revolt against it in some fantastic way. It differs just as little from Saint Bruno’s allegation that these unfortunate circumstances are due to the fact that those concerned are stuck in the muck of “substance,” have not advanced to “absolute self-consciousness and do not realise that these adverse conditions are spirit of their spirit.

[II. 1. Preconditions of the Real Liberation of Man]

[...] We shall, of course, not take the trouble to enlighten our wise
philosophers by explaining to them that the “liberation” of man is not
advanced a single step by reducing philosophy, theology, substance and
all the trash to “self-consciousness” and by liberating man from the
domination of these phrases, which have never held him in thrall. Nor
will we explain to them that it is only possible to achieve real liberation
in the real world and by employing real means, that slavery cannot be
abolished without the steam-engine and the mule and spinning-jenny,
serfdom cannot be abolished without improved agriculture, and that, in
general, people cannot be liberated as long as they are unable to obtain
food and drink, housing and clothing in adequate quality and quantity.
“Liberation” is an historical and not a mental act, and it is brought about
by historical conditions, the development of industry, commerce,
agriculture, the conditions of intercourse...[There is here a gap in the manuscript]

In Germany, a country where only a trivial historical development is
taking place, these mental developments, these glorified and ineffective
trivialities, naturally serve as a substitute for the lack of historical
development, and they take root and have to be combated. But this fight
is of local importance.

[2. Feuerbach’s Contemplative and Inconsistent Materialism]

In reality and for the practical materialist, i.e. the communist, it is a
question of revolutionising the existing world, of practically attacking and
changing existing things. When occasionally we find such views with
Feuerbach, they are never more than isolated surmises and have much
too little influence on his general outlook to be considered here as
anything else than embryos capable of development. Feuerbach’s
conception of the sensuous world is confined on the one hand to mere
contemplation of it, and on the other to mere feeling; he says “Man”
instead of “real historical man.” “Man” is really “the German.” In the first case, the contemplation of the sensuous world, he necessarily lights
on things which contradict his consciousness and feeling, which disturb
the harmony he presupposes, the harmony of all parts of the sensuous
world and especially of man and nature. To remove this disturbance, he
must take refuge in a double perception, a profane one which only
perceives the “flatly obvious” and a higher, philosophical, one which
perceives the “true essence” of things. He does not see how the sensuous
world around him is, not a thing given direct from all eternity, remaining
ever the same, but the product of industry and of the state of society;
and, indeed, in the sense that it is an historical product, the result of the
activity of a whole succession of generations, each standing on the
shoulders of the preceding one, developing its industry and its
intercourse, modifying its social system according to the changed needs.
Even the objects of the simplest “sensuous certainty” are only given him
through social development, industry and commercial intercourse. The
cherry-tree, like almost all fruit-trees, was, as is well known, only a few
centuries ago transplanted by commerce into our zone, and therefore
only by this action of a definite society in a definite age it has become
“sensuous certainty” for Feuerbach.

Incidentally, when we conceive things thus, as they really are and
happened, every profound philosophical problem is resolved, as will be
seen even more clearly later, quite simply into an empirical fact. For
instance, the important question of the relation of man to nature (Bruno
[Bauer] goes so far as to speak of “the antitheses in nature and history”
(p. 110), as though these were two separate “things” and man did not
always have before him an historical nature and a natural history) out of
which all the “unfathomably lofty works” on “substance” and “self-consciousness” were born, crumbles of itself when we understand that
the celebrated “unity of man with nature” has always existed in industry
and has existed in varying forms in every epoch according to the lesser
or greater development of industry, just like the “struggle” of man with
nature, right up to the development of his productive powers on a
corresponding basis. Industry and commerce, production and the
exchange of the necessities of life, themselves determine distribution,
the structure of the different social classes and are, in turn, determined
by it as to the mode in which they are carried on; and so it happens that
in Manchester, for instance, Feuerbach sees only factories and
machines, where a hundred years ago only spinning-wheels and
weaving-rooms were to be seen, or in the Campagna of Rome he finds
only pasture lands and swamps, where in the time of Augustus he would
have found nothing but the vineyards and villas of Roman capitalists.
Feuerbach speaks in particular of the perception of natural science; he
mentions secrets which are disclosed only to the eye of the physicist and
chemist; but where would natural science be without industry and
commerce? Even this pure natural science is provided with an aim, as
with its material, only through trade and industry, through the sensuous
activity of men. So much is this activity, this unceasing sensuous labour
and creation, this production, the basis of the whole sensuous world as
it now exists, that, were it interrupted only for a year, Feuerbach would
not only find an enormous change in the natural world, but would very
soon find that the whole world of men and his own perceptive faculty,
nay his own existence, were missing. Of course, in all this the priority of
external nature remains unassailed, and all this has no application to the
original men produced by generatio aequivoca[spontaneous generation]; but this differentiation
has meaning only insofar as man is considered to be distinct from
nature. For that matter, nature, the nature that preceded human history,
is not by any means the nature in which Feuerbach lives, it is nature
which today no longer exists anywhere (except perhaps on a few
Australian coral-islands of recent origin) and which, therefore, does not
exist for Feuerbach.

Certainly Feuerbach has a great advantage over the “pure”
materialists in that he realises how man too is an “object of the senses.”
But apart from the fact that he only conceives him as an “object of the
senses, not as sensuous activity,” because he still remains in the realm
of theory and conceives of men not in their given social connection, not
under their existing conditions of life, which have made them what they
are, he never arrives at the really existing active men, but stops at the
abstraction “man,” and gets no further than recognising “the true,
individual, corporeal man,” emotionally, i.e. he knows no other “human
relationships” “of man to man” than love and friendship, and even then
idealised. He gives no criticism of the present conditions of life. Thus he
never manages to conceive the sensuous world as the total living
sensuous activity of the individuals composing it; and therefore when,
for example, he sees instead of healthy men a crowd of scrofulous,
overworked and consumptive starvelings, he is compelled to take refuge
in the “higher perception” and in the ideal “compensation in the
species,” and thus to relapse into idealism at the very point where the
communist materialist sees the necessity, and at the same time the
condition, of a transformation both of industry and of the social structure.

As far as Feuerbach is a materialist he does not deal with history,
and as far as he considers history he is not a materialist. With him
materialism and history diverge completely, a fact which incidentally is
already obvious from what has been said.

Ruling Class and Ruling Ideas

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the
class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its
ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material
production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means
of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of
those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The
ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant
material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as
ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling
one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance. The individuals composing
the ruling class possess among other things consciousness, and
therefore think. Insofar, therefore, as they rule as a class and determine
the extent and compass of an epoch, it is self-evident that they do this in
its whole range, hence among other things rule also as thinkers, as
producers of ideas, and regulate the production and distribution of the
ideas of their age: thus their ideas are the ruling ideas of the epoch. For
instance, in an age and in a country where royal power, aristocracy, and
bourgeoisie are contending for mastery and where, therefore, mastery is
shared, the doctrine of the separation of powers proves to be the
dominant idea and is expressed as an “eternal law.”

The division of labour, which we already saw above as one of the
chief forces of history up till now, manifests itself also in the ruling class
as the division of mental and material labour, so that inside this class
one part appears as the thinkers of the class (its active, conceptive
ideologists, who make the perfecting of the illusion of the class about
itself their chief source of livelihood), while the others’ attitude to these
ideas and illusions is more passive and receptive, because they are in
reality the active members of this class and have less time to make up
illusions and ideas about themselves. Within this class this cleavage can
even develop into a certain opposition and hostility between the two
parts, which, however, in the case of a practical collision, in which the
class itself is endangered, automatically comes to nothing, in which case
there also vanishes the semblance that the ruling ideas were not the
ideas of the ruling class and had a power distinct from the power of this
class. The existence of revolutionary ideas in a particular period
presupposes the existence of a revolutionary class; about the premises
for the latter sufficient has already been said above.

If now in considering the course of history we detach the ideas of the
ruling class from the ruling class itself and attribute to them an
independent existence, if we confine ourselves to saying that these or
those ideas were dominant at a given time, without bothering ourselves
about the conditions of production and the producers of these ideas, if
we thus ignore the individuals and world conditions which are the
source of the ideas, we can say, for instance, that during the time that
the aristocracy was dominant, the concepts honour, loyalty, etc. were
dominant, during the dominance of the bourgeoisie the concepts
freedom, equality, etc. The ruling class itself on the whole imagines this
to be so. This conception of history, which is common to all historians,
particularly since the eighteenth century, will necessarily come up
against the phenomenon that increasingly abstract ideas hold sway, i.e.
ideas which increasingly take on the form of universality. For each new
class which puts itself in the place of one ruling before it, is compelled,
merely in order to carry through its aim, to represent its interest as the
common interest of all the members of society, that is, expressed in
ideal form: it has to give its ideas the form of universality, and represent
them as the only rational, universally valid ones. The class making a
revolution appears from the very start, if only because it is opposed to a
class, not as a class but as the representative of the whole of society; it
appears as the whole mass of society confronting the one ruling class. ”
—

Marginal note by Marx: Universality corresponds to (1) the class versus the estate, (2) the competition, world-wide intercourse, etc., (3) the great numerical strength of the ruling class, (4) the illusion of the common interests (in the beginning this illusion is true), (5) the delusion of the ideologists and the division of labour.

— It can do this because, to start with, its interest really is more connected
with the common interest of all other non-ruling classes, because under
the pressure of hitherto existing conditions its interest has not yet been
able to develop as the particular interest of a particular class. Its victory,
therefore, benefits also many individuals of the other classes which are
not winning a dominant position, but only insofar as it now puts these
individuals in a position to raise themselves into the ruling class. When
the French bourgeoisie overthrew the power of the aristocracy, it thereby
made it possible for many proletarians to raise themselves above the
proletariat, but only insofar as they become bourgeois. Every new class,
therefore, achieves its hegemony only on a broader basis than that of the
class ruling previously, whereas the opposition of the non-ruling class
against the new ruling class later develops all the more sharply and
profoundly. Both these things determine the fact that the struggle to be
waged against this new ruling class, in its turn, aims at a more decided
and radical negation of the previous conditions of society than could all
previous classes which sought to rule.

This whole semblance, that the rule of a certain class is only the rule
of certain ideas, comes to a natural end, of course, as soon as class rule
in general ceases to be the form in which society is organised, that is to
say, as soon as it is no longer necessary to represent a particular interest
as general or the “general interest” as ruling.

Once the ruling ideas have been separated from the ruling individuals
and, above all, from the relationships which result from a given stage of
the mode of production, and in this way the conclusion has been
reached that history is always under the sway of ideas, it is very easy to
abstract from these various ideas “the idea,” the notion, etc. as the
dominant force in history, and thus to understand all these separate
ideas and concepts as “forms of self-determination” on the part of the
concept developing in history. It follows then naturally, too, that all the
relationships of men can be derived from the concept of man, man as
conceived, the essence of man, Man. This has been done by the
speculative philosophers. Hegel himself confesses at the end of the
Geschichtsphilosophie that he “has considered the progress of the
concept only” and has represented in history the “true theodicy.”
(p.446.) Now one can go back again to the producers of the “concept,”
to the theorists, ideologists and philosophers, and one comes then to the
conclusion that the philosophers, the thinkers as such, have at all times
been dominant in history: a conclusion, as we see[27], already expressed by
Hegel. The whole trick of proving the hegemony of the spirit in history
(hierarchy Stirner calls it) is thus confined to the following three efforts.

No. 1. One must separate the ideas of those ruling for empirical
reasons, under empirical conditions and as empirical individuals, from
these actual rulers, and thus recognise the rule of ideas or illusions in
history.

No. 2. One must bring an order into this rule of ideas, prove a
mystical connection among the successive ruling ideas, which is
managed by understanding them as “acts of self-determination on the
part of the concept” (this is possible because by virtue of their empirical
basis these ideas are really connected with one another and because,
conceived as mere ideas, they become self-distinctions, distinctions
made by thought).

No. 3. To remove the mystical appearance of this “self-determining
concept” it is changed into a person – “Self-Consciousness” – or, to
appear thoroughly materialistic, into a series of persons, who represent
the “concept” in history, into the “thinkers,” the “philosophers,” the
ideologists, who again are understood as the manufacturers of history,
as the “council of guardians,” as the rulers. Thus the whole body of
materialistic elements has been removed from history and now full rein
can be given to the speculative steed.

Whilst in ordinary life every shopkeeper is very well able to
distinguish between what somebody professes to be and what he really
is, our historians have not yet won even this trivial insight. They take
every epoch at its word and believe that everything it says and imagines
about itself is true.

This historical method which reigned in Germany, and especially the
reason why, must be understood from its connection with the illusion of
ideologists in general, e.g. the illusions of the jurist, politicians (of the
practical statesmen among them, too), from the dogmatic dreamings
and distortions of these fellows; this is explained perfectly easily from
their practical position in life, their job, and the division of labour.